“Your mug of chocolate, sir.” said Hunt, setting the mug in its holder on the captain’s chart table.

“Where is Ensign Grimes, Lieutenant?” said the captain, asking after his usual aide-de-camp.

“Minor problem with a spill on his uniform, sir, I offered to step in.” John replied, smiling angelically.

“Very well, leave it there.” said the captain, waving John away.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” said Hunt.

“No.”

No, thought John, after you drink that hot chocolate there most certainly will not be anything else. John stepped quickly away down the thin corridor that ran from the captain’s cabin to the bridge. Dropping the tray behind some piping, he took the stairs down to the master’s cabin and checked on him. Snoring away, and his whiskey was finished, good, that was him out for the night as well.

For the next thirty minutes, he made his way around the ship. He had been careful to drug each of the senior officers and warrant officers that ate separately from the rest of the crew in their own mess, and now he had to check and see if they were all sufficiently disabled. For the crew he had not needed to be so subtle. There were two seatings for dinner for the bulk of the ship’s complement, served each side of the change of watch. The watch that currently manned the ship had eaten earlier, before their watch started, while the other had eaten just after they had gone off duty.

As the crew ‘on deck’ started to falter and pass out, the off-duty crew still had a groggy twenty minutes before their liberal doses of flunitrazepam kicked in. Basically John had given the entire ship a rufie. Standing on the bridge now, John watched as each crewmember started to flag. He walked around catching them and laying them on the ground. Deactivating their stations and the ship’s controls as he went. As the comms guy passed out, John reached over and flicked the kill switch on the ship’s radio and its intercom, disabling them both, and then entered in a kill code that he had programmed in weeks beforehand. The ship’s comms were now utterly disabled, its regular pings to the Admiralty back home now going off automatically via the same viral subroutine that made any other form of communication to and from the ship temporarily impossible. They were cut off.

Like every other important military asset actively deployed around the world, the Dauntless had been a hive of activity that day, responding to the events in Pakistan and Russia. Now John raced around the ship, checking key stations and making sure open systems were shut down as the officers and ratings that usually tended them collapsed slowly to the floor. He also shut off ovens and cooking ranges in the galley, deactivated and set the engines to idle, as he ranged all over the ship watching its officers and crew collapse.